Science

Hey, it’s about time I put up a new wall of links. In fact, I had so many that I had saved in various drafts I combined several together for this entry, and will get a separate entry that is links to cool posts on movie blogs later in the week. Learn from me and finish your articles! But let’s get on with the show…

**Can it be December already so I can watch the new Jiang Wen movie? Gone with the Bullets (一步之遙) will be the followup to Let the Bullets Fly, which was spectacularly awesome. Jiang stars along with Ge You, Shu Qi, Wang Zhiwen, Wen Zhang, and Zhou Yun, and the plot involves a beauty pageant.

**In yet another short gets optioned into a feature film news, Beyondhas been optioned by SyFy. Beyond was created by Raphael Rogers, who wrote and directed it on a budget of $1000. Beyond is about a woman who can teleport across space and time, and is the last of her family.

**Everyone’s favorite mobile game that’s just the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark will hit the big screen, where hopefully it will be more than just 90 minutes of the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Temple Run becomes the latest of small scale games to get a movie option (preceded by Angry Birds), thanks to Warner Bros., who are increasingly desperate to find a new franchise to milk. Speaking of which, I need to rewatch Raiders of the Lost Ark….

**South African thriller iNumber Number will get an American remake by Universal. No word yet on if writer/director Donovan Marsh will be involved. iNumber Number is about an honest cop who goes bad after being cheated out of a promotion. Soon he has bigger problems when the gang he robs wants revenge.

**I am very excited about the Flawed Dogsanimated movie, based on the books by Berkeley Breathed, specifically The Shocking Raid on Westminster.

**Nickelodeon will bring us a film calledBoogeymen, where a kid teams with the Boogeyman to investigate paranormal activity. I guess it’s sort of like that old Fred Savage movie Little Monsters, except they do Scooby-Doo stuff instead of just act silly. Boogeymen is based on a pitch from John Sullivan, and Howard Deutch will direct. Howard Deutch directed Pretty in Pink and several random sequels: The Odd Couple 2, Grumpier Old Men, and The Whole Ten Yards

The Tyrannosaurus rex family continues to expand with this new species, Lythronax argestes. The new tyrannosaurid shares a common ancestor with T-rex, and while much older, also shares much of the same skull construction. Later tyrannosaurids like T-Rex had larger jaw muscles and binocular vision, a trait Lynthronax also possesses.

Lythronax lived on Laramidia, along the western shores of the great seaway that separated North America; this landmass hosted a vast array of unique dinosaur species and served as the crucible of evolution for iconic dinosaur groups such as the horned and duck billed dinosaurs.

As noted by American palaeontologist Tom Holtz of the University of Maryland, “This new discovery also supports the idea that the giant thick-toothed Asian tyrants Zhuchengtyrannus and Tarbosaurus were immigrants from North America rather than their own Asian line, because they share a common origin with Lythronax and Tyrannosaurus.”

The evolutionary path of the tyrannosaurids has been a subject of debate, but there has been a batch of new species in the past decade or so that have helped paint a fuller picture of ancient life. And I suspect there are much more discoveries just waiting to be found and written up.

And more tyrannosaurids mean more dinosaurs to be brought back to life in films to eat people!

Back as in fossils of a new platypus species, that is! Obdurodon tharalkooschild is being nicknamed Godzilla Platypus due to the large size of the extinct platypus, 1 meter long. This makes it twice as long as living platypi, and longer than any known extinct platypus species.

Even more remarkable, all this information about Obdurodon tharalkooschild comes from just one molar. Now, modern platypus do not have teeth, but other extinct species do, including Obdurdon dicksoni, and from examining the size of the molars and extrapolating, the paleontologists were able to come up with Obdurodon tharalkooschild‘s size estimate. It is believed that O. tharalkooschild lived between 5 million and 15 million years ago, but a more exact time period cannot be determined at this time.

The structure of the tooth suggests the animal was capable of eating not only the small insects and crayfish on which modern platypuses dine, but also small vertebrates such as certain fish and amphibians, and even small turtles, the team reports.

That expanded diet is also interesting news, and puts a new perspective in what ecological niche older platypus species served.

The full paper will be published in the November 12th issue of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

Once again TarsTarkas.NET swims into the ocean of the internet and brings back a bounty of wonderful links, thanks to our illegal fishing methods that are banned by international treaties. So don’t tell anyone! Time to get this party started…

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians: The Official Series Bible is a setting based on a (fictional) television series based on the original film. Players take the role of human, elf, and Martian toymakers, working together to bring peace and understanding while foiling the schemes of naughty people from both planets. It is system-independent, meaning you can use the roleplaying game mechanics of your choice to play it. It’s good for a silly one-shot or a short campaign.

The Official Series Bible™ is a format for roleplaying game campaigns. Each setting is called a Pilot, like the first episode of a television series, providing enough information to get started and offering hooks for future adventures, be leaving things open enough for gamemasters to take things in their own direction. All information is presented without rules system information, so you can adapt it to the system of your choice.

**This cool creature is Helicocystis moroccoensis, and it lived 520 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion, a time when all sorts of new types of life emerged. Helicocystis featured “characteristics that place it as the most primitive echinoderm that has fivefold symmetry”.

**The Wolf of Wall Street is based on the memoir by Jordan Belfort, and details his life of excess at a brokerage firm, including corruption, the mob, goldfish eating, dwarf tossing, partying down, and securities fraud. And it looks fan-freaking-tastic from the trailer!

That’s all for this round of lots of random crap. Tune in next time for 2 crap 2 random!

Hello, boils and ghouls! It’s time for another cut of scare-tastic links that have nothing to do with the picture at the top of this post! That’s how we roll at TarsTarkas.NET, so let’s get on with the show!

If you are like me, you got piles and piles of stone cold cash that you don’t know what to do with. Don’t spend that money paying your phone bill, instead donate it some friends in need!

Slumber City is a film. A short film. A Student Film. It is the senior thesis project of Donald Hallene III (aka Me!) and will be the last big chance to show off my creativity and flair before I graduate from film school.

Slumber City follows Nathaniel McKay, a struggling writer who also struggles with bad dreams. As a child, he had terrible dreams, most featuring a dreaded figure he calls Mr. Night. As he grew older, he found ways to supress the dreams, but now they are fighting their way back, and his daughter Molly has started to have them as well.

While spending a weekend with Molly, the two of them are whisked away to a strange place called Slumber City, where all of Nathaniel’s repressed dreams live. Mr. Night has taken Molly, and Nathaniel has until sunrise to get her back. With help from a strange new friend, he must find the clues to free Molly.

Slumber City is a fun fantasy adventure set in a world of nightmares and monsters. The film will be shot in the Summer of 2013, with a public release currently scheduled for October 2013

The Cultural Gutter was created in the early years of the new millennium to fulfill a dream–provide quality, clear-eyed writing about disreputable art. Since 2004, we have written about videogames, comics, science fiction, fantasy, genre film, romance and television. And throughout that time, we have maintained a commitment to paying writers for their work.

In summer 2012, like many other arts organizations, we lost our Canada Arts Council operations grant. The legions of mazer tanks surrounded the vulnerable Cultural Gutter. But that fall, friends of the Cultural Gutter rallied to our Gutter-A-Go-Go campaign to help us keep our commitment to paying writers for their work. While we fell short of our goal, we raised enough money to make and send out all our contributor perks and keep The Gutter going until this June.

Now we hope to rise from the ashes as Gutter-A-Go-Go Raids Again!

**What horrors happen when someone edits in a bunch of softcore spots to a Santo film? FourDK takes the plunge with El Vampiro y El Sexo!

It’s that time again! No, not time to bury the hatchet! I’m still bitter after all these years, Tina Yothers… It’s time to link a bunch of cool posts on cool blogs and then some news stories and stuff and ramble on a bit.

ZombOObies exploded onto the social web last year, but there hasn’t been much news since then about the film being completed. What looks like a cool take on the Sushi Typhoon ultra gore flicks will hopefully see the light of day in 2013. The awesome Cathy Shim stars with Diana Toshiko and Marisa Tayui. Francois Fujimoto directs. Official site here.

While conducting experiments to create “the perfect boobs” a group of doctors are transformed into Evil Mutant Creatures with an unstoppable hunger for boobs! See our hot action women fight to keep their perfect breasts out of the evil doctors’ mutant hands!!!